Anywho, I recently noticed that when I play certain games (for instance, "Bud Tucker in Double Trouble" and also the Kyrandia-series), the F5 command to open up the ScummVM menu is replaced with the combination of Ctrl + F5. This made me somewhat confused and I even thought the games wouldn't give me access to the menu at all before I knew about Ctrl + F5.

* Why does this difference exist at all?
* What is the criteria for a game to be an F5-game as opposed to Ctrl + F5?

Obviously I am kind of nitpicking now, but it just made me wonder.

Thu Aug 10, 2017 1:37 pm

Longcat

Joined: 23 Sep 2006
Posts: 963

Because in some games the original shortcut to the menu was "F5", while in every ScummVM game, the main shortcut is "Option"+"F5"?

AFAIK The reason is slightly historical. Generally in the original games, if there was a key to bring up a Load / Save or other menu then it would be one of the Function Keys i.e. F1 etc.

We try to make things work as per the original interpreters so we mapped these as per the original, but over time this caused a fair amount of confusion and questions about "Where is the damn save in <GAME X>???" type posts, hence the Global Main Menu is added to give a solution for this and to allow other new buttons to be added i.e. Return to Launcher which were not in the original game dialogs / menus.

This is always a balance between keeping things consistent between game engines and keeping them identical to the original keyboard mapping of the game... which is not always possible in these days of touchscreens!

Overall, this ends up as a comprimise... but this is also why we now have the Key Mapper functionality to allow this to be modified on some platforms if needed.

Fri Aug 11, 2017 12:02 am

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